The fact that “South Louisiana culture” is broad, varied and as diverse as the ecosystem here does not escape me. Often I find myself describing my work as “documenting the culture of South Louisiana”. I’m aware that this will be a forever task, and entails much deeper exploration and explanation to be fully realized. It’s an amazingly scary and exciting undertaking and very important if we’re ever really going to convince the Big One$ to Spend the BIG money to restore and protect ALL of us “down here”.

Vanishing Points is a website that enables community members in South Louisiana to identify points of cultural significance that are threatened due to land subsidence, sea level rise and coastal erosion. The purpose of this project is to preserve this information for future generations of bayou residents while sharing noteworthy information of a people threatened by coastal land loss with the rest of the world. As part of an effort to document their threatened culture, community members log memories, interviews, and photos of places that have defined their community for generations, but are now disappearing.

This multi-faceted project continues to grow and evolve. We recently re-made the website and are currently working to create a short documentary about La Trouvaille in Chauvin, LA. Every time I think about this project I think about how fragile our unique culture is. Some think that our culture is lost- but this project enables me to see (and I hope enables you to see) that our South Louisiana culture is very much alive. Threatened, yes. But alive. Hopefully the threat of complete loss will empower us all to think more about what we can do to ensure it isn’t lost.